.The local news has an item about how easy it is for a small boat to set off from England, pick up "asylum seekers" in France and drop them on a beach in England, all without anyone knowing.

All of this is obvious, of course, and has quite likely been going on for years. But what worries me is that for the sake of the couple of hundred people that might come in this way each year, the Government is now going to feel challenged by this news item and will start harassing anyone sailing a private boat in the Channel. And then the next thing will be you have to be licensed to own a boat. And then you'll have to register your plans before you're allowed to make a journey in your own boat across the Channel. And then you'll have to ask permission to make a journey across the Channel in a private boat.

Seriously, immigrants are less threat to our freedom and way of life than what I fear the Government will do next to stop them coming in.

The local news has an item about how easy it is for a small boat to set off from England, pick up "asylum seekers" brandy and tobacco in France and drop them on a beach in England, all without anyone knowing.

This is news? The same thing could have been reported any time in the last three hundred years or more, just insert the appropriate commodity. But then most reporters are clueless about anything that didn't happen yesterday.

While local action against smugglers, such as coastal blockades, shore based patrols and licensing of boats might have had some effect, they didn't stop the most determined smugglers. The only really effective remedy was to remove the conditions that made smuggling profitable. In this case, that would be making the UK less attractive to asylum seekers, but I don't know how you'd do that.